Will sailors rush to take advantage of relaxed Navy rules on tattoos?

An indelible blue drawing of an ornate birdcage, festooned with roses and rose petals, wraps its way around Navy Corpsman Jessica Bryant’s forearm, according to a report on Military.com.

The 23-year-old sailor’s tattoo is large, but not big enough to be considered a “sleeve,” the type of design that covers an entire arm.

Bryant hopes to remedy that, thanks to new Navy rules that took effect Sunday aimed at attracting recruits among young millennials who have adopted tattoos en masse.

“When they make this really, really legal, I am going to finish the rest of it,” she said during a recent visit to the Champion Tattoo Company in southeast Washington, across the road from a Marine barracks.

Until now, sleeve tattoos have been barred under military regulations. The Navy is scrapping the ban — and going further still — to adopt the most lenient rules on body art of any U.S. military service.

From next month, sailors will also be allowed a tattoo on their neck, up to one-inch across, and restrictions will be lifted on ink below the knee or elbow, including on the hands.

Additionally, sailors with visible tattoos will be allowed to work as Navy recruiters, a gig that was off-limits to them before.

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An appeals court has cleared the way for U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s legal case to resume, rejecting prosecutors’ arguments that defense attorneys were given too much leeway on accessing classified documents, according to Military.com.

The United States Army Court of Criminal Appeals denied prosecutors’ appeal in a ruling released late Saturday by defense attorneys. The court also lifted a stay from February on pretrial proceedings being heard at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Bergdahl faces charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy after he walked off an outpost in Afghanistan in 2009 and was held by the Taliban and its allies for five years. The latter charge is relatively rare and carries a punishment of up to life in prison.

Prosecutors had argued the military judge erred in a decision that “directs the unauthorized disclosure of classified information and grants the defense unfettered access to classified information,” according to court documents.

In an opinion dated Thursday, the three-judge appeals panel wrote that it disagreed with prosecutors’ interpretation.

The judge overseeing Bergdahl’s military trial, Army Col. Jeffery Nance, had ordered prosecutors in February to turn over many of the classified documents they had gathered, subject to certain rules. His order had also allowed defense attorneys to obtain other classified information without taking steps that prosecutors said were necessary.

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A federal judge in San Diego has sentenced a U.S. Navy commander to 78 months in prison for providing classified ship schedules in exchange for the services of a prostitute, theater tickets and other gifts from a Malaysian defense contractor who overbilled the maritime branch by more than $34 million.

Captain-select Michael Vannak Khem Misiewicz, 48, was sentenced in federal court Friday in San Diego on one count of conspiracy and one count of bribery.

His sentence is the longest one handed out so far in one of the worst bribery scandals to rock the Navy.

Misiewicz pleaded guilty to providing classified information to Leonard Glenn Francis, whose Singapore-based Glenn Defense Marine Asia, or GDMA, used it to beat out competitors and overbill the Navy by submitting fake tariffs and port fees.

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A senior Pentagon official criticized the House Republican-led investigation into the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya, saying the panel has made a “crescendo” of costly, duplicative and unnecessary requests, including some based on claims made on Facebook or talk radio, according to MSNBC.com.

Stephen C. Hedger, an assistant secretary of defense, expressed frustration with the Benghazi panel’s potentially futile calls for witnesses and information, including some that were later withdrawn. Hedger also challenged a line of questioning of current and former military officials that focused on hypotheticals suggested by committee members or staff.

“This type of questioning poses the risk that your final report may be based on speculation rather than a fact-based analysis of what a military officer did do or could have done given his or her knowledge at the time of the attacks,” Hedger wrote Thursday in a letter to Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House Benghazi panel.

Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, died during the twin assaults on Sept. 11, 2012. Questions about security at the diplomatic facility have dogged Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time.

Hedger complained in the three-page letter that the committee asked the Pentagon to track down four pilots who did not deploy to Benghazi on the night of the attacks, as well an unnamed mechanic at an air base in Europe who claimed on Facebook that planes could have been sent to Benghazi to respond.

This story was originally published May 2, 2016 at 11:22 AM with the headline "Will sailors rush to take advantage of relaxed Navy rules on tattoos?."